Things that keep me from my WSS project

Monthly Archives: February 2014

I’m not sure “attention” was part of the drill manual in the civil war, but whatever the instructions were, some of these soldiers probably would have had them in German.

The 20th Louisiana was interesting in that about 2/3rd of the men in the regiment at Shiloh were German speakers. So I would be guessing their company officers and ncos might relay orders in German. Certainly in the heat of battle I’m sure a lot of German would have been flying around.

I really have no idea what they should have looked like. I could find no info. So I went with the typical Lousiana issued frock coat. And I gave them a Bragg flag. I’m also uncertain about that.

This is the 2nd to last regiment I need to finish to put a cap on my ACW Shiloh project, for now at least.

I’m very tempted to paint up Gibson’s brigade in order to have one full division from Shiloh. But it’s about 25 stands and 100 figures is a lot for me on this right now as I have so many other distractions clamoring for my attention. One cool thing about Gibson’s brigade is that there would be a unit with a few stands of Zouaves and everyone needs some Zouaves in their collection, no?

All I have left to paint to complete Anderson’s brigade is the 17th Louisiana. They are primed but it will be awhile before I can finish them off.

Here are the other two late war German pieces I finished, a Jagdpanzer iv and a 250/1 Neu. Both are from Warlord Games. I like the Jagdpanzer iv quite a bit although I didn’t really do much to it.

It’s basically glued together, painted, decaled, and weathered. It’s a pretty easy job. Now that I’ve done one I would like to do another, although I’m not sure I will. The kit comes with shurzen. I left them off but it would probably look cool with them on. Now that I know a little more about putting them together, maybe I’ll do one with them on. Not sure.

It’s kind of odd looking in a cool way. I’ve always been fond of it for some reason.

I also put together the Warlord 250/1 Neu. I’m less fond of this model than the others but again, it’s one I might want to do another of. The kit is pretty basic and goes together easily enough. It comes with a gunner who fits really nicely. He has a base cast on though which strikes me as odd.

This model would lend itself well to a lot of additional work. If I were to do it again, I’d add a lot of stowage, figure out what to do about those license plate numbers and perhaps some other markings. Again these models don’t show mud and dirt all that well because of the camo scheme, but you can see where I splattered some mud up on the rear of this. I might have overdone it a little.

This is my favorite tank. I guess it’s a lot of folks favorite tank. It is also the first 1/56th scale tank I’ve done completely myself. It’s not too bad, and I’ve learned a lot by doing it. I have a couple of others done that I’ll post too.

It’s a warlord panther A with zimmerit. It’s roughly based on something from 12th ss in Normandy. I got a decal sheet but the decals mostly didn’t take and I ended up using archer transfers. It’s not too bad. The two 12th ss decals on the front and back are almost eligible – I wish I had used archer transfers for those. I used archer transfers for the numbers and those are great I think.

Most of the good ideas for this came from Boycie on the Steve Dean forum in this thread:

http://www.sdean-forum.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=32486. I haven’t done it nearly as well as he did, but it’s not a bad start I think. I’m tempted to do a group of Panthers from 1/24 in Normandy – they have a very distinct look. I am really torn between continuing to do 1/56th resin wargaming models and 1/48th plastic kits. There seems to be a lot more available in 1/56th so I’ll stick with that probably, but I wonder.

One of the interesting things about doing a Normandy German tank is that you can put whatever kind of mud weathering on it, and it’s not going to show up all that well. If you click on the rear view picture you’ll see about as much of the mud as you’re going to see and it’s not much. And it’s not nearly that visible in real life.

Another Louisiana regiment in Anderson’s brigade at Shiloh. It only mustered around 170 men at the battle, so again warrants only a couple of stands.

I’m not terribly certain about the uniforms. In Daniel’s book on Shiloh he says they wore light blue uniforms but his footnote to an eyewitness describing the brigade deployed says Clack’s battalion was recognizable because of its “light uniforms.” So I chose to just give them a medium gray coat – that will be noticeably lighter than all the other regiments in the brigade. I gave them black facings on the coat and black stripes on the pants as that was pretty common in the Army of the Mississippi at the time.

I only have about 24 more figs to paint to be done with Anderson’s brigade. I’m fairly resolved to get through that and be done with ACW stuff for awhile. We’ll see.

These guys are so cool. But I really don’t want to do a whole platoon of them, do I?

I picked up this book on painting German World War 2 guys called Painting War. There’s a great video review of it on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFlFNPDn-uU. He describes methods for painting several German camo uniforms. I wanted to do splinter, so I grabbed a pack of Bolt Action Fallschirmjager support troops. It includes 3 teams: the schrek team pictured above, a sniper team, and a flamethrower team.

Here are the snipers:

These are all really, really excellent sculpts. I really don’t want to do a whole platoon of them, do I?

I would use them for Chain of Command, except that, really, I don’t want to do a whole platoon. The methods that Painting War lays out are really easy to follow. Using the method for the jump suit made it really easy to paint. There are three chunks of uniform to paint though, and then the raindrops, so it takes a bit, but it’s not really difficult. The most difficult thing I found painting these, and it’s true of all German WW2 figs, is all the other gear they are carrying around with them. You want to put a little bit of variety to it, and there are quite a few bits, so that gets a little tiring.

These are great sculpts. I believe Paul Hicks sculpted all of these. Here’s the flamethrower team:

I didn’t do a great job painting the face of the assistant, so I’m showing you the rear view. But I’ll post a few more pics at the end. In Chain of Command the panzershreck team is part of the platoon’s regular order of battle. But the other two team would be support options, so no guarantee you’d be able to use them in any given game. The Fallschirmjager are real bad ass troops and Chain of Command reflects that – elite, an extra command die, and like the panzergrenadiers loaded up with firepower. I really don’t want to do a whole platoon of them, do I?